I'm not sure if he was even on the show anymore, since I've only watched it sporadically. But every time I see a segment start with "Reporting now from the Hillary Clinton campaign..." I hit fast-forward.

The Tick pilot is up at Amazon; you don't need Prime to watch it for free.

I quite enjoyed it. It's a pretty big departure from the two previous series, but that's as it should be; the Tick has kinda always been about poking fun at whatever the current superhero trend is. So we've got an origin story (Arthur's) with a motivating tragedy, and most of the comedy comes from just how over-the-top evil the Terror is. It's pretty dark stuff -- which makes the Tick stand out all the more, because he's still very much the Tick, spouting the same old Ben Edlund purple prose.

Give it a watch! And then go fill out a survey, because that's how Amazon decides what shows to pick up for a full series.

I don't watch Colbert every night, and this clip is a good illustration of why: his off-the-cuff stuff is so much better than his scripted stuff; watching him stall for time while they're waiting for the graphics to render is more fun than watching the actual show usually is.

He's still good. And occasionally even brilliant. I mean, last week he got Congressman John Lewis to do a stage dive. That certainly ticks my "Well, that was not what I expected" box. But I hate seeing him waste his talents on boring, by-the-numbers interviews with stars promoting their movies.

The first episode of Better Things, Pamela Adlon's new show, aired last night. Louis CK is co-creator, co-writer, and director, and if you like his show you'll probably like hers. Not a lot of plot but some great weird little slice-of-life stuff, work and awkward relationships and conversations with the kids that don't quite fit the usual sitcom tropes. Also, at one point she goes off on a profane rant in the Bobby Hill voice.

I thought the first episode of Son of Zorn was pretty good. It's high-concept as fuck (He-Man as deadbeat dad trying to get to know his son) but it's got a good cast (including Tim Meadows, Artemis from Always Sunny, and Jason Sudeikis as Zorn). I liked the dumb jokes and the cartoon violence; there's definitely potential here.

If Barry Allen goes back in time and stops Thawne from killing his mother...why doesn't the timeline reset to the original timeline, where Thawne never went back in time and killed Barry's mother? Why does it, instead, create a third, completely different, timeline?

At least the TV version didn't pile on all the extra incoherent nonsense. Like the part about how Barry's mother surviving somehow impacted events that happened farther in the past, like where Superman's rocket landed.

The first episode of Frequency the TV show is a pretty straight-across adaptation of the first act of Frequency the movie, if I remember correctly (and it's been 15 years since I saw it so I may not remember correctly), except now Jim Caviezel is a lady and her dad was an undercover cop instead of a fireman, because "cop" is the only job allowed on TV dramas.

I thought it was pretty good because I thought the movie was pretty good. However, the movie had enough content for exactly 1.75 more episodes, and I'm not sure how they're going to extend the premise much farther than that.

Well, we've already established the police chief is corrupt, so that could be enough material for another episode or two. But not a whole season.

There was an episode or two of Life on Mars that involved Sam chasing a criminal using knowledge he'd learned in the present, but Life on Mars wisely chose not to make that stuff its main focus. An episode or two of that could work, but making it a regular thing would wind up being pretty formulaic. I also hope they don't play the "serial killer got away, now we have to try and stop him before he finds his next victim" angle too many times.

I suppose they could also pad out the "boyfriend doesn't recognize her" part to a full episode. Maybe after they save her mom something happens so he never gets in that car accident, and then she has to deal with the ethics of whether or not she should cause him to be in a car accident, and then by the end she's begging Reverse Flash to go back in time and kill her mother.

I'm only seeing four episodes of the show listed on IMDb and TVDB, so it sounds like they're playing whatever they do after that pretty close to the vest. That could be a good sign. I doubt they're doing anything super-dramatic like starting a new story with a new cast (because that sounds pretty expensive), but maybe shift focus somehow, have other characters talking to other loved ones in other time periods? Who knows.

The premier of Legends of Tomorrow feels like a major course correction, though it's got a couple of issues.

GOOD: No Hawks anywhere to be seen.

GOOD: The first act is fun as hell and is exactly what the show should be like all the time.

BAD: Rip is still a giant fucking wet blanket.

GOOD: But he disappears and maybe we won't see him for awhile!

BAD: Damien Darhk? Fucking seriously? But we just got rid of that guy!

GOOD: Okay but the Matt Letscher version of Reverse Flash has not overstayed his welcome yet, even if the last couple episodes he was in were not very good. He is a great choice for a villain in a time-travel series!

UNCERTAIN: The two scenes it took to get the whole team back together after they were scattered throughout the timestream seemed a little quick. I feel like this could have been a whole episode, but on the other hand maybe that episode would have been really tedious and it was better to get the cast back together immediately? Hard to say, but there will probably be at least one really bad episode between now and the end of the season where I can say "They should have just dropped this one and spent an episode on the getting-the-team-back-together story."

CONTINUITY: Okay if there were costumed superheroes in the 1940's how come nobody on any of the three shows in this universe has ever mentioned this?

Still, right out the gate it feels like they've mostly figured out what didn't work in season 1 and tried to make it more fun. In fact, Arrow and Legends both feel like they're taking a step towards trying to be more fun and less mopey, while Flash unfortunately is going in the opposite direction so far this season.

Oh right, I haven't mentioned Supergirl, have I?

The Supergirl premier was basically perfect. They brought Superman into the show in a way that didn't upstage her but depicted him just the way I like him: a humble, aw-shucks farmboy who commands respect and adoration every time he walks into a room, who loves his family and wants to feel a connection to his past. Why can't movie Superman be like this Superman?

Supergirl continues to be the most fun and upbeat superhero show. It's not always as good as this week's episode was (and in fact it's often downright mediocre -- though it looks like it's got better villains this season, so that could help), but it's the happy one, and that's something the genre really needs.

I can't really talk about new Dirk Gently without comparing it to cancelled Dirk Gently.

I think Cancelled Gently had a more appropriate cast, and it was certainly a more British show. It also went more balls-out science fiction than the new show.

But the new show seems much more committed to telling a complex, longform story with a lot of moving parts whose interconnectedness is not immediately clear. In that sense, it's much more structurally similar to the books.

Timeless is pretty so-so as a drama, and downright disappointing in its depiction of how changing historical events can alter the timeline. (As far as I've gotten in the show, the most significant change that's resulted from the constant, weekly meddling in the past is that the main character's sister no longer exists. That's it. Absolutely nothing significant seems to have changed outside of the life of the show's protagonist.)

But it's pretty impressive in its use of real-life historical trivia. Like pointing out that John Wilkes Booth's brother saved the life of Abe Lincoln's son years before the assassination. Or, in the episode where the bad guy tries to kill the Apollo 11 crew, having Nixon give the actual speech that he had prepared in case the mission had gone wrong. What the show lacks in creativity, it makes up for in attention to detail.

So like, everyone is all current and up to date on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, right? Say that you've watched pretty much the best show on network TV. Say it. SAY IT OR I'LL KILL YOUR HUSBAND. I'LL DO IT. I'LL GUT HIM LIKE A FISH.

Seriously, you need to have some love for a.) romantic comedies b.) musicals and c.) crippling self loathing of one form or another in order to really get everything out of this show but for me and the two other people in the world in the center of that venn diagram CxG is pretty much the perfect goddamn show. It nails relationships and friendships and the way people can be their own worst enemies in both of those things with an honesty that few other things I've watched have and it knows how to play the long game with the best of them. A fairly minor example of that is Rebecca spends money like water because hey, she's a big-shot lawyer from New York .. and about 2/3rds of the way through season one she starts bouncing checks because she's been spending money like water. The show never forgets to consider the consequences of all the decisions its characters are making.

You may or may not gel with the characters (it can be pretty hard to see what others see in .. a lot of the relationships on the show, actually) at first, but they pull a trick similar to of all things Danganronpa, using familiar tropes and tricks to eventually peel back the layers on what's really making them tick.

And most importantly, the music. The goddamn music. Rachel Bloom is a nightmare threat of a creative person. Not every song is an out of the park winner, but when something like 70-80% of them are on a weekly television schedule, that's kind of insane. Everyone who's anyone gets something of their own to sing eventually, and the music ranges from full-on sweeping musical theater numbers to spot-on style parodies second only to Weird Al's stuff.

This is my favorite fucking show airing right now. The mid-season finale of season 2 closed out with a style parody of Alone (and other such 80s power ballads). It's got the best obnoxiously earwormy Makeover song since Clone High. It has a big tap dance number about tapping that ass. It's got a Bette Midler-esque ode to self-hatred. The season one finale brings in the singing voice of Princess Jasmine and Mulan to belt out a fake Disney princess song, and for that matter, one corner of the love triangle is Santino Fontana (i.e. Hans from Frozen) who murders it whenever he's given a song highlight.

Anyway, season 1 is on Netflix. So watch it. Or just watch probably my favorite song based on how many goddamn times I have to pull it up whenever I read certain family members humblebragging on Facebook.

(Worth noting; on her personal channel, she posts explicit versions of several of the TV edited songs, and they're usually both worth watching. Sometimes the extra explicitness makes them better, and sometimes playing coy makes it funnier.)

Maybe you have something else to binge on your backlog first, but c'mon and settle for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.